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Artist

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Year
Seville ca. 1617/18 - 1682
Price range
500,000 – 3,000,000 USD +
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was one of the most important artists of the Spanish Baroque. He lived and worked in Seville for the entirety of his life and produced some of Spain’s most emblematic seventeenth-century religious works.

Murillo’s style represents a confluence of Spanish Caravaggism, Venetian theatricality and Flemish Baroque. His works are an inventive fusion, integrating his talent for portraiture and genre painting into a highly distinctive religious idiom. His works were greatly admired, especially during the nineteenth century, but were later considered overly sentimental and religiose. He painted a wide variety of subjects from Biblical scenes to portraits and genre scenes, but his fame rests chiefly on his devotional works, especially subjects like the Immaculate Conception, dedicated to the cult of the Virgin Mary, which enjoyed enormous popularity in seventeenth-century Spain.

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Selected Artworks
Market

Top 3 auction prices

3,552,257 $
2017
4,302,123 $
2005
4,692,651 $
1990

Details

The sales are: Sotheby’s London – 5 Jul 2017 lot 32 (2,746,250 GBP), Christie’s London – 8 Dec 2005 lot 19 (2,472,000 GBP), and Christie’s London – 14 Dec 1990 lot 31 (2,420,000 GBP).
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Notable exhibitions

Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, El Joven Murillo, 19 October – 17 Janruary 2010; travelled to Sevilla, Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla 18 Feb – 30 May 2010. Curated by Benito Navarrete Prieto and Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez.

Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682) : Paintings from American Collections, 10 March –16 June 2002; travelled to Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 14 July – 6 October 2002. Curated by Suzanne L. Stratton.

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Murillo in Focus, 16 November 1990 – 13 January 1991. Curated by Xanthe Brooke.

Madrid, Museo del Prado, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo: 1617–1628, 8 October – 12 December 1982; travelled to London, Royal Academy of Arts, 15 January – 27 March 1983. Curated by Diego Angulo Iñiguez.

 

Books on Bartolomé Esteban Murillo

Xavier F. Salomon, et al., Murillo: The Self-Portraits, exh. cat. New York, 2017.

Manuela M. Marqués and Virginia A. Martin, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), dibujos : catálogo razonado, Santander, 2015.

Gabriele Finaldi, ed., Murillo and Justino de Neve: The Art of Friendship, exh. cat. Madrid, 2012.

Jonathan Brown, Murillo: Virtuoso Draftsman, New Haven, 2011.

Susanne Stratton-Pruitt and Jonathan Brown, Bartolome Esteban Murillo (1617-1682): Paintings from American Collections, exh. cat. New York, 2002.

Jonathan Brown and Richard G. Mann, Spanish Paintings of the Fifteenth through Nineteenth Centuries, Cambridge, 1990.

Diego Angulo Iñiguez, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, 1617-1682, exh. cat. London, 1982.

Diego Angulo Iñiguez, Murillo: Su vida, su arte, su obra, 3 vols. Madrid, 1981.

Antonio Palomino de Castro y Lelasco, Lives of the Eminent Spanish Painters and Sculptors, 1715-24, trans. Nina Alaya Mallory, Cambridge, 1987.

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